AMD Barcelona on schedule for mid-2007

According to Pat Patla, director of AMD's server worksation division, Barcelona is a new processor design, 90 per cent of which is brand new. He reckons it will make AMD the first firm to deliver a native quad-core X86 chip and its introduction will be as "substantial" as that of the original Opteron in 2003.

AMD likes to remind us about Opteron. It's on the back of this chip that the chipmaker has managed to carve out a 27 per cent market share in the server space where, almost to its own surprise it is now taken seriously.

Johne Fruehe, a channel market developer at AMD reckons the success of the chip with OEM customers had had the knock-on effect of fostering interest in the channel. "The interest of the major OEMS builds credibility in the channel," he says. " We used to be constantly asked when Dell would come on board, now we longer have such discussion."

To build on its success and to match CEO Hector Ruiz's ambition, much rides on the relative success of Barcelona. AMD has laid an upgrade path for the chip by sticking to its commitment to run it on the same platform and within the same thermal envelope as its Dual-core rev F chip.

Customers, those that want to, can simply pull out the old dual-core silicon and slip in a four-core Barcelona chip and even re-use their old cooler, should they choose. Any firm of decent size that has send its engineers out with a pot of thermal paste and a bag of four-core chips is likely to be barking, however. But, naturally, marketing doesn't have to make sense to be effective.

Barcelona will be AMD's first 65nm server chip. As the boys suggested this morning, the firm likes to try out its process shifts on consumer desktop chips before sticking the really important stuff on there. And since things are going nicely at the Dresden fab, according to AMD Barcelona is looking good to go in "mid 2007".

Thereafter, two and four-way systems will pop up like magic mushrooms on a damp autumnal field, as the focus will shift to 16-core systems.

AMD says its design aims for the chip focused on performance and power considerations with an eye on virtualisation, while sticking to the drop-in upgrade strategy.

The cores themselves are enhanced and the firm has jiggled with the memory controller and cache memories. Being what AMD terms a true quad-core implementation, the cores can be individually throttled, the AMD gents said.

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